Leveling the Playing Field: Why Growth-Stage Companies Are at a Search Crossroads, and What Comes Next

min read

June 26, 2025

Alexandra Tu

Sr. Product Marketing Manager

For mid-sized companies, the pressure to scale digital growth is relentless, and nowhere is that more evident than in search. The search landscape is constantly changing. New AI features are consistently rolling out in traditional search engines and AI-powered answer engines are gaining market share, meaning brands must shift their strategies from tried-and-true SEO tactics to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or AI Optimization (AIO).

With limited bandwidth and a fast-moving industry, marketing teams are struggling to keep up with the changes and to maintain visibility in this new environment, all the while being pushed to outperform. It’s not for lack of ambition, but rather a need for more time, better tools, and, perhaps most important, support.

But pushing fixes and optimizations live is often a painfully slow waiting game. Marketers get stuck behind backlogged engineering teams, which delays results and means increased pressure to show proof of impact. Meanwhile, AI-driven search and algorithm shifts only raise the stakes, making it harder to stay competitive and to justify ongoing investments in search to skeptical leadership.

What was once an effort to optimize for page one of Google has become a race to win visibility in a rapidly expanding and increasingly intelligent search landscape where a clickthrough is no longer the goal. For growth companies, this shift actually presents a rare opportunity.

A majority of marketing leaders are already actively shifting strategies to adapt to AI search, and over one in five companies are already using generative AI to reinvent their workflows. That number will only increase as models improve. By using your smaller size to turn AI search into a sustainable engine for awareness and revenue, agile growth companies have the opportunity to get ahead of larger competitors.

Search visibility is no longer reserved for companies with the biggest teams or deepest pockets. Today, success is driven by speed: how quickly you can scale, your time to market, and your ability to adapt to change fast. But speed alone isn’t enough. To outperform the competition, you need the right technology to enable that speed, and a partner who can help you turn momentum into measurable results at a time when it has never been more imperative.

The dev backlog problem and the real cost of standing still

A common struggle for growth-focused marketing teams is the gap between strategy and execution. You might have a talented in-house expert — or even a small team — who knows what to fix, but they’re held back by:

A lack of the tools to gather and consolidate the right data
The absence of solutions to leverage this data to implement optimizations and fixes automatically
Long engineering queues for implementation
Limited time or support to learn complex platforms
The challenge of measuring and proving ROI fast enough

Without a clear way to move quickly, critical optimizations get delayed, maybe even indefinitely. If optimizations are eventually pushed through and don’t yield the results expected (or worse, yield negative results), that poor performance may discourage your marketing team from submitting more updates for fear of wasting valuable engineering bandwidth.

Over time, delays and hesitation turn into lost visibility, which turns into missed traffic, and ultimately, missed revenue.

How growth-focused teams can move from insight to action

For search optimizations to truly perform in today’s landscape, mid-sized companies need to remove friction from the optimization process so that when your team identifies a technical issue, a content opportunity, or an indexing problem, they can immediately do something about it.

First, adapt your metrics for new traffic and new platforms

With the rise of AI search comes an increasing number of AI bots crawling your site. Improving visibility in answer engines and in AI search results depends on understanding not just what content is indexed, but also how and why your site is being accessed by these crawlers.

Optimizing for AI crawlers and the models for which they index information will allow you to adapt your content based on your brand’s priorities, whether those include serving up content to train large language models (LLMs), or having your brand appear in new, AI-augmented SERP features like AI Overviews (AIOs), conversational query responses, and summaries like AI Mode, ChatGPT, or Perplexity.

Next, lean into AI and automation to bridge resource gaps

AI and automation can dramatically reduce the manual effort and time required for high-impact search optimization work. For example, large websites often struggle to keep metadata updated across thousands of pages, a task that can now be streamlined using generative AI to automatically create and optimize title tags and descriptions at scale.

Automation can also enhance analysis like keyword research by surfacing intent-driven insights and aligning content more closely with how users search in AI-powered environments. This allows teams to more quickly prioritize topics and language that are more likely to resonate and rank.

To get that optimized content indexed where it matters (i.e. where users and agents are looking), leverage tools like Botify SmartIndex to automate and speed up high-impact tasks, such as:

Sitemap generation
Notifying indexes through IndexNow when content gets updated or created
Pushing updated or new content directly into search engine indexes with Push to Bing and Push to Qwant.

Incorporating AI agents into data analysis speeds things up further, as agents can analyze large batches of data in seconds, enabling you to go from raw data collection to actionable insights in significantly less time. And when it comes to implementation, automated solutions can remove the traditional dependency on engineering by enabling needed updates like redirects, internal linking, and structured data to be deployed directly. This not only clears bottlenecks but also accelerates time to impact, making search optimization more agile and scalable.

Support built for what growth-focused brands actually need

Until now, the most advanced SEO platforms and services have been built with enterprise teams in mind, leaving growth-focused companies stuck with a mix of lightweight tools that lack scalability and the challenge of managing everything in-house.

Botify’s new growth solutions aim to address this gap and provide growth-focused companies and industry newcomers with everything you need to develop GEO strategies, leveling the playing field at a time when you need it the most.

By combining automation and agentic solutions with hands-on expertise, we’re giving ambitious, growth-stage companies the advantage of speed, agility, and scalability when optimizing for traditional and AI-powered search platforms:

Botify Growth is designed for mid-sized companies with in-house search resources. It offers self-serve access to our AI-powered platform, paired with guidance from Botify Services. With automation solutions across diagnostics, indexing, content enrichment, testing, and deployment, search teams can autonomously execute optimizations at scale — moving faster, staying agile, and growing visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search.
Botify Accelerate is a fully managed search solution led by Botify's Consulting team, ideal for companies with limited resources, a preference for a hands-off approach, or the need for extra support to drive search success. Whether supplementing your existing team or acting as your dedicated search partner, we take full ownership of strategy, execution, and reporting. Powered by Botify’s AI-driven automation platform, we proactively resolve issues, implement optimizations, and deliver tangible business outcomes.

Our offerings are flexible and designed to meet you where you are. Whether you want direct access to our platform, a fully managed solution, or a hybrid approach, we’ll tailor the engagement to match your goals and resources, making it easier than ever to compete and win in the evolving search landscape.

Navigate the future of search in partnership with Botify

Search isn’t getting easier, but it is getting smarter. This is your opportunity to create real competitive differentiation. Capturing visibility now, while your competitors aren’t moving fast enough, will help you to get ahead and stay ahead.

Don’t stop at simply maintaining traffic. By optimizing for both traditional and AI-powered search, you can reach audiences that would have otherwise never discovered your brand, unlocking new demand.

Ready to take the next step? Contact our team to learn more about how Botify can support your growth strategy.